MANUSCRIPTS should include a brief cover letter that includes author’s name, address, phone number, e-mail address, book title, and brief biography; an acknowledgment’s page listing previously published poems; table of contents; up to 120 pages of original poetry; and an SASE for reply or return of manuscript (as requested) if submitting via snail mail. Submittable online submissions preferred (see link). *Mailed manuscripts should be unbound, typed, & page numbered, and may contain author’s name and information.

*Note to Poets: In an effort to make life easier on you (so you don’t have to reformat your entire manuscript) and easier on us (so we don’t have a clerical nightmare), book-contest submissions are not “blind.” (Frankly, we don’t really believe that even “blind” submissions are truly blind, but that’s another story). Our editors read poems, not bios. So it really doesn’t matter who you are. What is your writing like? We have published debuts from authors with very few publications and we have published seasoned authors with previous books. We can totally, honestly, and ethically say that we have never/will never publish a collection based on who the poet is or where the poet is from. The poems matter. That is all.

ELIGIBILITY: Open to all poets, with or without previous book publication. New and emerging writers are especially invited to submit. No restrictions on content, style or subject matter. We are simply looking for the best poetry we can find. When Poets & Writers asked us what we were looking for, here was our response (maybe it will help you consider submitting): “We like honest voices, stunning imagery, and language so good we get chills reading it. We like books that open themselves, invite us to sit in comfortable chairs, and speak to us like we’re equals in an imbalanced world. Mainly, we want to publish poetry with a pulse in the heart of the Central Valley for as long as we live here.” (And because we’ve been asked before, we absolutely accept & publish manuscripts by poets from all over the country. You do not have to live in CA to be eligible.)

PRIZE: *Winner receives $1000, a publishing contract with generous royalties paid to the author for every book sold, and 15 free copies of published book. (*We reserve the right to select 2nd and 3rd place winning manuscripts if the quality, time, and finances are available. Pending author approval, 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive a book contract with no advance paid. Poets whose manuscripts are selected as 2nd or 3rd place finishers will be able to make the final decision to accept or deny this publication prize. With the exception of the advance, book contracts for 2nd and 3rd place winners will remain the same as grand prize recipient. )

“Honesty will never go out of fashion in poetry, especially as it is channeled through the clean lyrics of Laurie Zimmerman’s Bright Exit. These poems are so searching; they press against the veil of appearances, demanding to learn the truth of what’s really there –tender hearted, and sensuous, sure, but equally smart and tough-minded, repeatedly, impressively refusing easy sentimentality. It’s that rigor of honesty that makes these poems the rich, reliable tutorial in soul-making that they are. I relish them.”

—TONY HOAGLAND, author of Unincorporated Personas in the Late Honda Dynasty

“Toward the end of Mann’s “Tonio Kroeger,” the artist declares that for him nothing is “sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.” Laurie Zimmerman’s poems are grounded in that same sense. She has a great eye for detail (a bird has “tiny noduled feet,” mussels have “blue doors, thin wings opening and closing”) and a great heart for the larger events of human life: “Celebration Fragments” is one of a group of poems about coming through breast cancer that are heart-breaking, celebratory and true. The tone is always modest, but poem after surprising poem is the work of a wise and humane new writer.”

—ED OCHESTER, Editor, Pitt Poetry Series & author of Sugar Run Road

“Laurie Zimmerman’s collection Bright Exit is a study in loss—loss of names, loss of identity, loss of relationships, loss of footing in the world: “Someone is saying goodbye. Someone/is saying I’m dying and hello.” But these losses do not drown the poet or the reader. Instead Zimmerman’s poetry provides a tender and sure kind of lift out of what could be despair. Her words move the reader toward an understanding that even such a collection of losses can lead us toward a new sense of self and the world around us all, and even as the last poem in this wonderful collection ends, and “the poem folds its wings/but another happiness/flies up,” readers get to fly with it, buoyed by all of these fine poems.”

“Paul’s poetry is planted in the order of the earth but stretches, grows organically to enfold the ripened fruit of wife, child, friend. His is the grace of honesty without brutality, deep feeling without sentimentality. His work wears well – and abides within his reader.”

—W.H. Ryan

“Paul Neumann’s poetry engages both intellect and feeling with a subtle blend of nature’s many moods and settings, rendered in rich, vivid detail; each poem culminates in a stunning perception of the unity pervading all nature, a unity that includes both poet and reader. Neumann’s art is so subtle that his poems become a kind of invisible glass through which the reader seems to be looking into the poet’s innermost being, seeing what the poet sees, feeling as he feels. Neumann’s awareness of life’s final days, symbolized by the setting sun, and his acceptance of it as an inevitable part of human existence, leaves the reader uplifted in spirit. From Neumann’s perspective, life flows from and through nature, and this union brings a deep sense of the rightness of all that he sees, and has seen.”

—Bernard Morris

“Paul Neumann’s contemplative poems are tender and wise, humble and celebratory. Here is a father, husband, son, and friend who chronicles human relationships and a life well-lived in California’s Central Valley and on its Central Coast, a true poet in tune with the natural world like few poets have ever been. I love this book. This Valley is a generous gift from a poet at his best. It is our good fortune to enjoy it again and again.”

“With her debut, Jacqueline Jones LaMon graces us with a collection both intro spective and out of body, her poems taking on the weight of the everyday world, and the extraordinary within it. GRAVITY, USA is not just a book filled with a subtle, sorrowful, and ultimately brazen power, but a place where you’ll want to visit, and stay.” —Kevin Young

“Jacqueline Jones LaMon has a wonderful ability to hear what the rest of us don’t, and the great gift of being able to dramatize the unheard and the half-spoken . . . . This is a book of marvelous voices and portraits, an impressive debut collection.” —Maura Stanton

“In lively, resonant language, [the poems of GRAVITY, USA] show again and again the necessary reaching toward song that connects us.” —Natasha Trethewey

“These poems are so precise and natural that you may not, at first, notice the room and weight they are making in you—the lines break, the lines surprise, the lines ride through some very honest regions of witnessing and listening. A powerful balance is at work . . . .” —Thomas Sayers Ellis

“Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s poems embody a stillness and grace. They illuminate the mysterious distances between us that are essential to love.” —Toi Derricotte

“Flicker is a memoir in verse of a life well lived. Lynn Hansen rightly names the collection for her favorite bird, and for the flickers, or moments, of happenings caught in words, illustrating phases and interests of a lifetime. She carries us through childhood’s joys of “forest humus, thick moss / and a bouquet of wild orchids” and woes, “the word move was profane because it frees the rat of anxiety that gnaws on the tight knot in my gut.” She rejoices when she declares, “When I retire I’m going to write poetry.” Then for a decade or more, that’s precisely what she has done. Lynn was determined to be a scientist in a time it was regarded as impossible for women; her thirty-three-year career of teaching biological sciences at the college level has proven her right. Her keen naturalist’s eye, her awareness and love of all life on this planet, and beyond, show in her poems. She even celebrates the lowly zucchini and rutabaga, though she does sigh toward the end of summer, “Zucchini manna again?” These observations are woven into the sum of time, the treasure of relationships, “just as our lives gathered out of jumble, then cemented with a matrix of mutual respect.” Lynn’s lone robin “lifts his bugle beak to call up morning,” and so lifts us all.”

–Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Los Molinos, California

“Flicker by Lynn M. Hansen is an excellent read. While each poem is intensely personal, moving from childhood experiences to motherhood to traveling the world to growing older, Hansen generously takes us along on all her journeys, creating poems that welcome all comers. Her close observations of the natural world, of lands both distant and close to home, create a landscape at once scientifically clear and poetically imagined, and her poems about growing up and getting older and the joys and losses that come with those parts of our lives, will make readers laugh and cry, sometimes all at once. In reading this book, I grew to even more deeply appreciate our world, our Great Central Valley, and Lynn Hansen’s poetry, and I suspect the same will be true for all who read this celebratory work.”

On October 22, at midnight, the online “launch” for a new poetry anthology occurred. This anthology SKYROCKETED to become the #1 Amazon Poetry Best Seller, the #1 Amazon Mover & Shaker, the # 1 Amazon Hot New Release: Poetry, and broke through to the top 100 Amazon Best-Sellers in Books — all in under 18 hours since its launch.

Modesto has long been tainted by negative press, in no small part thanks to its rank as one of the top-ten worst U.S. cities to live in due to its unemployment rates, illegal drug production/sales rates, crime rates, gang violence, and education. What those reports can’t account for is the pulsating “underground” cultural community that has existed in Modesto for years and that has experienced a rebirth in the past decade. There is a real and vibrant arts scene in Modesto, created in part as a response to the negative image Modesto portrays to society at large. The astonishing and amazing response to the online launch of More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets is concrete and unavoidable proof that Modesto can no longer be defined by its negative reputation.

The following numbers are irrefutable:(based on Amazon.com Sales Rankings, 10/22/11, at 11:30pm)

Best Sellers in Poetry # 1 Hot New Releases in Poetry #1 Movers & Shakers in Books #1 Hot New Releases in Books #43 Best Sellers in Books #73

About the book:

More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets celebrates the poetry of a place seen more often as a cultural backwater than as a region hugely rich in sounds, words, and imagery. Accompanied by stunning portraits of each poet, More Than Soil, More Than Sky gathers the diverse voices, styles, and subject matter that come from poets living in and around one small town in the heart of California’s Great Central Valley. This anthology documents not only this moment in a vibrant and exciting poetry community, but also stakes a claim in the larger poetry world, making clear that Modesto is more than soil and more than sky. It is an up-and-coming force in the poetry world.

“Terry Godbey’s Beauty Lessons are dynamic narratives of loss and recovery that wrestle with motherhood, domesticity, the body’s frailties, and the unleashed wilderness of desire sucked on ‘like peppermints.’ There is plenty of regret here, and yet, ultimately, this is a book about triumph and redemption.” –Dorianne Laux

“Terry Godbey’s poems are carefully deployed, personally revealing, and shamelessly boy-crazy. In the best of them, she leads the reader through the doors of adolescence and into the house of poetry.” –Billy Collins

“Terry Godbey’s Beauty Lessons is a poetic homage to the fearlessness of women and girls, beginning with learning to ride a bicycle in a dream and ending in triumph over fears and betrayals. Most dazzling are her apostrophic meditations, and a metonymic range that dances among cereal and war games, test pilots, earthquakes and sonic booms. These poems open onto a journey through the whole of a life thus far, and throughout the reader feels buoyed on the fountain of air that held up the rider in the dream.” — Carolyn Forché